modern wood-engravers, just as Chéret is the undisputed master of the
poster. Lepère's ruling quality is strength. He seems to have
rediscovered the mediaeval limners' secrets of cutting the wood, giving
the necessary richness to the ink, creating a whole scale of half-tones,
and specially of adapting the design to typographic printing, and making
of it, so to say, an ornament and a decorative extension for the type.
Lepère is a wood-engraver with whom none of his contemporaries can be
compared; as regards his imagination, it is that of an altogether
curious artist. He excels in composing and expressing the life, the
animation, the soul of the streets and the picturesque side of the
populace. Herein he is much inspired by Manet and, if we go back to the
real tradition, by Guys, Debucourt, the younger Moreau and by Gabriel de
Saint-Aubin. He is decidedly a Realist of French lineage, who owes
nothing to the Academy and its formulas.

It would be evidently unreasonable to attach to Impressionism all that
is ante-academical, and between the two extremes there is room for a
crowd of interesting artists. We shall not succumb to the prejudice of
the School by declaring, in our turn, that there is no salvation outside
Impressionism, and we have been careful to state repeatedly that, if
Impressionism has a certain number of principles as kernel, its
applications and its influence have a radiation which it is difficult to
limit. What can be absolutely demonstrated is, that this movement has
had the greatest influence on modern illustration, sometimes through its
colouring, sometimes simply through the great freedom of its ideas. Some
have found in it a direct lesson, others an example to be followed.
Some have met in it technical methods which pleased them, others have
only taken some suggestions from it. That is the case, for instance,
with Legrand, with Steinlen, and with Renouard; and it is also the case
with the lithographer Odilon Redon, who applies the values of Manet and,